The Fun Side Of Social Media

By Tom Platt-19th June 2015

A now far cry from its ‘traditional’ 140 character limit, Twitter has evolved into one of the biggest and most popular social media platforms. Go on your feed now and you’re likely to see a plethora of links, videos and images. The same can also be said for Facebook, which allowed the likes of video and images much earlier in its day.

From a B2B perspective, we’ve noticed an increase in interaction on our clients’ accounts when it comes to visual posts. With so many companies and organisations vying for the attention of the viewer, something that really stands out and jumps off the screen is what counts.

With that in mind, we’ve been looking at new and innovative ways to help make social media posts stand out, increasing engagement along the way.

With Graham Plumbers’ Merchant, we’ve implemented two campaigns of real note in the past six months. The first, a Christmas promotion, saw various Graham branches across the UK perform Christmas songs – video footage of this was then drip fed, week by week, onto Graham’s dedicated blog feed and promoted via its Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to help drive further traffic to the page.

The aim of the promotion was purely to encourage engagement with Graham customers and suppliers – doing it in this way meant we were able to inject a little humour too, helping Graham show the helpful, friendly and fun side of the company in the process.

The second Graham campaign saw the launch of what has come to be known as the ‘Graham Gurn’ - members of staff posed for pictures whilst pulling faces with their heads through toilet seats - thankfully these were not attached to toilets at the time! Again, seemingly whacky at first thought, we saw a great deal of interaction amongst the online community that Graham has built up.

What does this actually do for the company though? Well, they say laughter can be the key to someone’s heart and a customer’s heart is a very important thing indeed – make a customer smile and they’re sure to remember the company at a later date. And that’s what’s important – the customer needs to be given a reason to keep interacting online.

Another social media campaign designed to encourage online dialogue – and importantly, with a smile – was created for boiler manufacturer, Alpha Heating Innovation in the run up to Movember. Creating a series of four moustache mugs, the online campaign requested that plumbers and installers send in a photo of themselves drinking from the mug..and voila! Instant moustache!

In order to raise money for the Movember Foundation, Alpha agreed to make a donation once it reached certain milestones – so, £10 for every 10 photos received using the #AlphaTash hashtag and so on. Supporting the photo campaign, we also created a short shareable gif, showcasing all four mugs available – this was also used online in order to create added interest.

The campaign proved to be incredibly successful and it’s reasonable to say that this was solely down to the visual nature of the posts – making the promotion stand out in an unusual way really paid off!

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CIB is an award winning, full service construction marketing and construction PR agency. Based in Surrey and Cheshire, our services include PR, social media, design for print, corporate identity, digital, video and media planning/buying.